Last Updated on September 7, 2021 by admin
Technology companies are increasingly leveraging content marketing to generate leads and demand. In 2021, there is an increased emphasis on demand and lead generation — and conversions. It may be a result of the pandemic and subsequent pressures from a changing market, but the cause remains to be seen. In this week’s article, we will look at some key content marketing insights for tech marketers for 2021 to generate leads, demand, and increase conversion.
Leads
When building a lead generation strategy, it’s important to cast a very targeted net so that you are reaching the desired audience but also ensure that it’s wide enough to find your audience through the multiple formats and marketing channels they use to consume content. One thing is for certain: webinars and live streams took the front seat of tech marketing in 2020. According to Content Marketing Institute, live streaming as a form of content marketing increased 33% in 2020 compared to 13% in the previous year. Last year opened up a whole new world of possibilities for achieving brand awareness and increasing lead generation.
What’s the move for 2021? Tech marketers should develop a playbook of which channels brought forth the best lead generation initiatives, which channels are promising, and which channels have been underutilized to reach potential leads. As 2020, saw a shift in the way that tech marketers typically execute, keeping a record of those benchmarks and best practices will lay a solid foundation for 2021 and beyond.
Demand
According to Content Marketing Institute, there has been an uptick in lead/demand generation to the tune of 7% (86% vs. 79%) over last year. To generate demand via content marketing effectively means to illustrate the “why” behind the product. A key ingredient to generating demand is appealing visuals and persuasive content repurposing.
There are two primary goals to keep in mind in tech marketing to generate demand. One role is to keep your finger on the pulse of consumer behavior and what channels they are paying attention to regularly. Email, social media, and live streaming all function differently than they did 18 months ago, and the landscape will likely change in another 18 months. Make sure you’re using the right channel for the content and features that you want to highlight.
In other words, things that should have been an email newsletter were likely a low-performing live stream or video on your website. Or maybe something that needed to be a “how-to video” was a poorly written case study.
What’s the move for 2021? With so many tools and platforms in front of consumers on a daily basis, it is imperative that tech marketers are assessing the best channels for their desired target audience that help illustrate “the why” and encourage demand. As the industry continues to see an uptick in demand generation, it can easy to get lost in the crowd. Effective data and analysis to improve demand generation will be critical moving forward.
Conversion
As we covered earlier, consumer demand is changing at a rapid pace; and the development of new tools and platforms where consumers can digest advertisements is increasing, too. Tech marketing is at an advantage as it can meet consumers quickly and effectively at multiple touchpoints.
According to Business News Daily, user experience (UX), voice search, and chatbots are some primary ingredients that have helped lead to conversions in 2020. The article points to Salesforce data that notes 69% of U.S. consumers prefer using chatbots when engaging with brands since it often yields a faster response. On the flip side, most of the small business owners in the survey said they don’t use chatbots, even though the tech can help answer basic customer questions 24/7 so owners can focus on other tasks.
What’s the move for 2021? As we see an increase in these tools, tech marketers must develop a plan to do quality checks and audits of tools they utilize as conversion channels on a regular cadence. In the tech world we live in, these audits must be proactive and scheduled to test for efficiency and effectiveness. As these tools can be the primary driver of the user experience which leads to conversion, they should be controlled and audited often to ensure a seamless process.
It will be important to keep a finger on the pulse of these — and other — tech marketing trends for the rest of 2021. As the shift to digital channels continues and becomes more prominent, it’s key to focus on ways to improve lead and demand generation and conversion by leveraging technology that customers are responsive to.
